Colts Neck wants the Asbury Park Press and two others to go to court before public records from the suspension of the police chief are released. That’s prompted two state lawmakers to contemplate legislation to stop government agencies from forcing litigation to resolve the initial validity of an OPRA request. (Getty Images)(Photo: Getty Images/Creatas RF)

The public has no right under state law to review police dashcam videos to determine if a police officer acted properly during a high-speed chase or if the officer was justified in using non-lethal force to subdue a suspect, the state Supreme Court ruled Monday. Read the full decision at the bottom of this story.

The court ruled 4-3 that the videos from police vehicles, commonly called dashcams, are related to criminal investigations and they're not required by state law to be made. That means the government doesn't have to turn them over under the state's open public records law.

“Most of the videos in that category that would either confirm that the officers acted appropriately or dispute that they acted appropriately are going to be shielded from public view," said open records advocate John Paff, who filed the lawsuit against the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office, which the Supreme Court ruled on Monday.

"And that defeats the entire purpose of why the cameras were instituted in the first place," Paff said.

The Asbury Park Press obtained a copy of the video because it was added to publicly available court documents by the officer's attorney — court records are governed separately from state public records law. The video is posted at the top of this story.

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Police dash camera videos are exempt because they're criminal investigatory records and not required by law to be made, the supreme court ruled.
Andrew Ford, @AndrewFordNews

Last year, the state's highest court ordered the release of police use of force reports because the state attorney general requires those reports to be made. In that decision, the court ordered the release of dash camera videos of a fatal police shooting under common law, which involves case by case decisions by judges balancing the public's interest in seeing such video with the state's interest in keeping it secret.

The court drew a distinction Monday, determining that while the state attorney general's policies have the force of state law, the orders of a municipal police chief do not.

Monday, the court found that though the chief of the Barnegat police issued an order requiring officers to use the cameras on their cars, that doesn't carry the force of law.

“Obviously we’re very happy about it," Samuel J. Marzarella, chief appellate attorney for the prosecutor's office said of the decision. "We thought that the court did an excellent job in construing the legislature's intent on the criminal investigatory records exemption from OPRA.”

Paff said the outcome was "a disappointment."

"When you don’t have the videos, all you have are the police official reports which oftentimes go to the police’s favored interpretation of what occurred," Paff said. "So sometimes the public has good reason to doubt the police officer's official reports of events, especially when there’s a video that does exist, that the police admit exists, that would satisfy the public’s concerts, but that video will not be released.”

“I think that it’s sound policy," Marzarella said of the directive, explaining that these decisions are made by the attorney general to establish uniform policing standards, as opposed to leaving the decisions to the state's hundreds of police chiefs.

Paff said he doesn't think the attorney general's directive went far enough.

“The public has an interest in making sure that police officers apply force in appropriate ways, regardless of whether the use of force is deadly or not," he said.

Dash camera videos could be made public through an order by Grewal, a point noted in the Supreme Court's dissenting opinion.

"The attorney general or the legislature can undo the damage caused by today’s decision," the court wrote. "The attorney general can adopt a statewide policy that addresses whether and how police video recordings are made and maintained, as he did with use of force reports."